#3 - Goal setting, Speed Producing, & How I Wrote the 'Come Away' Trailer Music

Hey Guys,

I hope you have had a great week.  §

My week has been pretty full of creativity, banter, and miniatures so I have had a blast!

I’ll cut straight to the chase. Here are my week’s creative output that I think you will enjoy!

PODCASTS: Goal Setting Secret

I am a huge fan of goal setting and in this week’s podcast I discuss one of the “secrets” that goal setters often forget to include in their plans.

I have previously forgotten this too but doing this makes the whole experience so much more exciting!

I even give you my secrets to creating a full five year plan too which has given me the most mind-blowing results over the last decade or so!

TRAILER MUSIC SCHOOL: How I wrote the music for the ‘Come away’ Trailer

Yet another walkthrough of one of my placements.

This time I give you a peak behind the curtains of an unusual track that landed a pretty big trailer.

You’ll have to watch the video to find out what makes it unusual though ;)

You can check out the trailer with my music on it below:

YOUTUBE: New Series Coming Soon

From a very early age I was exposed to sampling by my step-sister who had a Casio SK-5. We used to record ourselves saying “bum” and “poo” and then make tunes out of that.

Hours of laughter ensued.

Since then. I have always had a soft spot for single sample based instruments.

You know I am a huge fan of limitations as a way to force you to be more creative so I decided to start a new series on my YouTube channel. The series is going to focus on recording a single sample and trying to make a piece of music out of it with only the assistance of a drum machine, and do it all in under 10 minutes.

I had a dry run of it this week (which I will share next week) and I was able to create a track in 25 minutes which I was pretty happy with given I spent a lot of the time ‘fiddling’.

Out of this I plan to create a full track, a video, AND a sample library for each one-shot sample I create.

I am very excited about this creative challenge.

So I think I have my whole game sorted out for this now so get yourselves prepared for next week when this series goes live.

If you are interested in increasing the speed of your output then check out this video of mine that pretty much covers how I am able to work so freely.

BLUE PEARL & Protege

This has been an exciting week for us; custom scoring for one of our Protege students, a new team member, and more first class music being delivered to the industry.

We are also opening up the application process for next year’s masterclass students at Protege, so if you are interested then send an email to info@protege.school and let them know you want to apply.

The feedback from this year’s students has been so incredibly positive and the fact that we are getting our students paid work now is AWESOME!

DOTS, LINES, & PAPER: Webcomic just for the fun of it!

STREAMING & MUSIC MARKETING

I have, over the years, been endlessly fascinated with getting my music heard by ‘the public’.

I had a MySpace page, blog, Soundcloud, and of course a digital distributor.

The thing is, I know this is something that ALL musicians who produce music are interested in too.

So, I thought I would start to experiment with it and share my results with you guys in the hope that you might experience some returns.

I recently shared a music niche that I have released work in with one of my previous students.   With this niche I landed a track on two Apple Music playlists and at it’s peak it was bringing in £2000 per month in royalties.

It was my first “viral” track.

The composer who I shared this with then released three tracks in that niche that then got picked up by the same playlists #winning!

I love it when stuff like that happens.

The niche by the way was New Age music and the artist is This Shimmering Sky.

I intent to give more nuggets like this away. Currently I am exploring advertising as a way to increase revenue. This is of course a tricky one as you would need to make sure that the cost per click is low but also that the music is good enough for them to stick around for a considerable amount of streams so as to mean your return on ad spend isn’t rubbish.

It’s a money pit I know but if I can figure out any decent way to explore this I will share it too.

Wonderful Fans

I would also like to say thank you to those of you who have been leaving reviews, comments and messages of positivity and warmth.

Those messages make it all worthwhile, so thank you.

Hope you have wonderful weekends chaps,

You are absolute LEGENDS!